Having seen the film The Internship, I felt adequately briefed for my visit to Google Campus in the East End. These are genius children who spend their lives in a tech playground and who depend on the over-the-hill and hopelessly uncool to explain to them how human beings work.

The first bit played out. In the reception is a sort of Tardis, a confession box for newcomers to start their lives over. There are shelf-loads of retro objects, intended to inspire a sense of entrepreneurial continuity but which are just as likely to provoke hilarity. A typewriter! An ugly old first-wave computer! A television with only four channels! It was like a retrospective glimpse behind the Berlin wall. It was also a depiction of my life.

The wrong part of the stereotyping is that the Google young are unlike the rest of us. There is a kind of earnestness which still feels more West Coast than East End — and Google leaders regret that Oxbridge and UCL alumni seem less attracted to becoming entrepreneurs than graduates of Harvard and Yale.

But once you get past the fact that working life at the Campus comes down to a cup of coffee and a screen, the motivation is understandable and laudable. Most revealing is that some of the people at Google Campus don’t even really understand technology. Granted, they tend to be women. The rough division I witnessed was that women pitched the business while men translated it into a technological model. What everyone was working on was ingenious ways to solve the headaches of modern existence. Algorithms for the working wardrobe. Networks for urban dog care. Opportunities for exercise in the office.

The most enlightened part of Google Campus seems to be philosophy of work. First, that sharing ideas is a good thing. Cross-fertilisation of thought and the matching of skills and needs drives business. Isolation is the killer. The future of the office turns out to be the office.

Second, success is built on both idealism and realism. Google Campus is full of dreams but everyone seems to understand most businesses will not succeed. A capitalised and profitable business is a source of wonder as well as celebration.

The collective excitement of Google Campus turns out to be capitalism. Why were we ever surprised that the company opted for minimum tax? Anti-establishment entrepreneurs, whether Richard Branson or Eric Schmidt, are not socialists. They use their outsider status as a competitive advantage.

Google’s decision to bow to political (and public) concern about access to pornography on the internet is astute business. Technology has to work for humanity, rather than outside it. Security, privacy and social responsibility are human needs that do not date in the way typewriters have. Everything changes, but people are still the same.

Selina is absurdly just fab

It’s good to see Borgen back but my favourite programme on women in politics remains Veep. The US vice-president’s experience of enlightened Scandinavia in the last episode was to be groped by the Prime Minister’s husband, both a diplomatic outrage and a useful distraction from other potentially damaging stories. The personal is political. Armando Iannucci’s comic creation of Selina Meyer is the finest on screen. Also, Iannucci does not demean her as a woman. It is a study in absurdity; all the planes and cavalcades and trappings of office cannot save Selina from a 24-hour news cycle and the limitations of her power to do anything.

Tonic for the troops: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer in Veep

Not cool to be bad at school

Michael Gove responded angrily to Simon Cowell’s flippant advice to the young “to be useless at school, then get lucky” as Cowell had done. On the face of it, this is a stuffy politician sticking his oar into showbusiness and making a fool of himself. But Gove was being deadly serious and I understand why.

Last week the Evening Standard celebrated its state school awards, particularly commending schools that have succeeded against the odds. One head teacher I spoke to was clear about the stakes. Outside school were many temptations to fail, the lure of gangs, drugs and easy money. Above all, there was a culture which encouraged particularly boys that academic failure was somehow cool. Inside the school, teachers battled to inspire the opposite belief. They called for hard work, discipline and high expectations.

Any hint of mockery about these values and the edifice of aspiration collapses. The Education Secretary was furious with Cowell because most pupils will not get lucky after failing at school. They will become NEETS.

An acting test of character

At the Evening Standard theatre awards, winning actress Helen Mirren said audiences had fallen in love with her character, the Queen, not her. Last week I saw audiences fall headlong for another character, a no-nonsense doctor who found her husband’s sexual appetites endearing.

The warmth towards Issy Van Randwyck’s Serena in Raving at the Hampstead Theatre was downright wistful. What if there were such a woman, amused by rather than disapproving of men and taking a cheerful view of life? Van Randwyck told me at the theatre awards evening she had based her character on my sister-in-law. I had not realised there was a female ideal so close to home.